Archive for the 'Electronic Publishing' Category

Tuesday, September 30th, 2014

Columbia University Press is proud to announce the launch of To the Point an exciting new e-book series that extends the scholarship of our authors for a growing global and digital audience. We present standalone chapters from the press’s forthcoming fall season books, with original short-format works to come to the series in the future.

These works serve to introduce our authors’ provocative ideas to new readers in accessible, affordable formats. Featuring works by Bruce Hoffman, Julia Kristeva, Evan Thompson, and others in disciplines ranging from politics and philosophy to food science and social work.

To the Point titles are available for only $1.99 from your favorite e-book vendor.

The first five e-book shorts to be released for sale in the To the Point series are:

“If we are to have a life of the mind, we need carriers of this life. University presses perform that essential function.” — Jay Parini

Taking place November 11-17, 2012, University Press Week highlights the extraordinary work of university presses and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and an informed society. University Press Week promises special events and readings at universities and in communities across the country, as well as online galleries of selected titles and other features.

One of the parts of the UP Week celebration that we are most excited about here is the University Press Week Blog Tour. From Monday through Friday of next week (November 12-16), the blogs of 26 university presses will be coming together to explain the importance of scholarly publishing. Over the course of the week, each blog will post one official UP Week post. When all of these individual posts are read sequentially, they will tell the story of university presses and the value they have added to public and scholarly life in the United States. You can find the schedule of the UP Week posts here. Be sure to check out all the essays, especially the article to be posted here at the CUP Blog on Friday, November 16. Many of the 26 blogs (including the CUP blog) will also be posting additional UP Week content throughout the week.

Be sure to keep up with University Press Week events and articles through Twitter via the #UPWeek hashtag!

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American University Presses this past week, one of the hottest topics was the issue of patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) at research libraries. In a panel on Tuesday, Rick Anderson from the University of Utah Libraries and Joseph Esposito, a publishing consultant who often writes about the effect of PDA on the publishing industry, discussed the future of the relationship between academic publishers and academic libraries in the light of rapidly evolving PDA models. They’ve discussed the issue before on several occasions at The Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best articles from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) Annual Meeting was this past week in Chicago. Accordingly, the Texas A&M Press Consortium answers the most pressing questions about the Association, namely “What Is AAUP? And Why Do We Care So Much?” (Shameless plug: make sure you stay tuned for our AAUP Twitter Roundup, coming soon!)

Tomorrow, June 23, is the 40th anniversary of Title IX. Title IX “bans discrimination based on gender in federally funded educational programs,” and, while it has had important impacts on a wide range of education programs, it is probably best known for its effect on women’s sports. At From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Deborah Brake takes a close look at the reasons that Title IX holds “such a special place in US popular culture.”

With the 2012 Summer Olympics fast approaching, another intersection of sports and gender-rights is making headlines: the treatment of transgender athletes in athletic competitions defined by the gender of the participants. The Harvard University Press Blog takes a close look at why these “Gender Games” are such a tricky issue, using the work of Rebecca Jordan-Young to show that “[s]cientifically, there is no clear or objective way to draw a bright line between male and female.”

Two hundred years ago this Monday, June 18, the War of 1812 began as James Madison signed a declaration of war against Great Britain. At the UNC Press Blog, historian Jeff Broadwater discusses how Madison’s reputation was permanently affected by the war and asks us to reconsider the popular narrative that “Madison led an unprepared nation into an unnecessary war.” At This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, historian J.C.A Stagg looks at recent works of scholarship about the War of 1812 and what they tell us about how we use history to create national identities.

Few American sports stars have defined the “all-American hero” like Joe DiMaggio did in the 1930s and 1940s. At the Yale Press Log, Jerome Charyn discusses how DiMaggio was able to capture the spotlight in America. Charyn claims that the certainty that DiMaggio provided in times of uncertainty was an important part of his appeal: “The nation was going to war, and you had this man who personified stability. It wasn’t that he hit in 56 games, it was that he hits in game after game after game. You could depend on it. You could count on it. In a very scary time, there was always Joe DiMaggio.”

This week Beacon Broadside featured the third of their fascinating interviews with Michael Bronski about changing American conceptions of gender over the centuries. This week he discusses “The American Man: From Ichabod Crane to Jackie Chan.” There are a number of great quotes from the interview, but my personal favorite is this one: “So one way of looking at these books–be it James Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain or Herman Melville–is these are really the early template for what we now understand to be the buddy movie.”

Arguments over laws governing citizenship and violence against women have featured prominently in the media lately, but less talked-about is the impact of these discussions on laws protecting Native American women living in reservations. The University of Minnesota Press Blog has an excellent post detailing the complexities of this situation by Mark Rifkin, “Reauthorizing Indianness (or Acts of Violence against Native Self-Determination).”

Our New York neighbors at Fordham ImPRESSions featured a fascinating post by John Waldman on New York’s “only true freshwater river, the Bronx River” in the South Bronx. The NYC Department of Parks and the Bronx River Alliance have been trying to restore the Bronx River. The river is home to the American eel, “the most mysterious fish in the sea,” and Waldham accompanied filmmaker Mathias Frantz in an attempt to find out more about the eels and their Bronx River habitat.

Reviving distressed cities is a fascinating process, and at the Penn Press Log, Brent Ryan looks at urban renewal project in Philadelphia. The Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) cleared a huge number of vacant and dilapidated houses from Philly neighborhoods. Unfortunately, after the 2007-2008 housing crash, the city is saddled with debt from the NTI and many of the cleared housing lots sit unused. In his post, Ryan proposes a number of solutions that might help Philadelphia deal with the negative consequences of the NTI.

We’ll wrap up this week’s edition of the University Press Roundup with an interview with Lance Hosey at Island Press Field Notes, the Island Press Blog. Hosey believes that our current understanding of sustainability is limited by our reliance on technology in solving sustainability problems: “Life is more than its ‘resources,’ and sustainability must mean more than just the efficient use of those resources.”

This week was been a big one for Barack Obama, as he openly announced his support for same-sex marriage in an interview Wednesday, a move that will has wide-ranging social and political implications. The OUPblog ran a guest post by Elvin Lim about America’s perception of Obama’s record on Tuesday, before any hint of the Wednesday interview had leaked out. It would be very interesting to see how different a similar article written after the Wednesday interview might be.

Jamie Moyer made his official MLB debut in 1986. He’s still pitching today. This week, his Side of the Pond, the Cambridge University Press blog, featured a fantastic article on Moyer by Stephen Partridge. My favorite Moyer statistic: Moyer has faced ~9% of all players to have an at bat in MLB history. That’s incredible!

Yale University Press’s blog is running a series of posts for Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day focusing on good parenting. This week, they ran a very interesting post looking at the work of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on “childism.” It’s a great read on a subject that isn’t intuitively obvious. Young-Bruehl claimed, “Childism is the hardest form of prejudice to recognize because children are the one group that, many of us think without thinking, is naturally subordinate.”

At the Harvard University Press Blog, Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold has a guest post in which she looks at the education reform ideas of Meira Levinson. Levinson’s project, laid out in her book No Citizen Left Behind, calls for additional civic involvement in schools, particularly for poorer students.

This week is Teacher Appreciation week, and in honor of the occasion Beacon Broadside ran a series of posts on educators and education. Perhaps the most moving of these posts is a heartfelt article by former teacher David Chura on how the standardized test system in America keeps students who have fallen behind in their studies from catching back up, even when they want to and are helped by hard-working and talented teachers.

From the Square, the blog of NYU press, has an interesting piece by Andra Gillespie on Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker recently made headlines for saving the life of a neighbor from a burning building. Unfortunately, Gillespie claims, the popular conception of Cory Booker as a hero hurts Cory Booker as a politician.

The story of the Spanish conquest of Central America is amazingly complicated. The UNC Press blog tackles the political side of the story in an interview with Laura E. Matthew on indigenous conquistadors and how the cooperation with the Spanish has left complicated legacies of racial identity in modern Guatemala.

As always, please leave any suggestions, questions, or criticisms in the comment section!

Friday, April 27th, 2012

Our weekly roundup of recent blog posts and features from other academic presses:

We’ll start things off this week with Harvard University Press’s tribute to Levon Helm. Helm was, of course, the drummer and one of the vocalists of The Band, and Harvard’s post reflects on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the most famous song featuring Helm’s voice.

The University of Minnesota Press Blog tackled a very tricky issue this week in a guest post by Roland Bleiker: what exactly should be done about North Korea? Bleiker believes that the best approach we can take in encouraging political, economic, or cultural change in North Korea is “information diplomacy.”

At the LSU Press blog, guest blogger John M. Sacher looks back at Louisiana’s secession from the United States in 1861. Louisiana has (and had in 1860) a very unique cultural identity, different from other Southern states like Mississippi or Alabama. Sacher tries to reconcile this cultural difference with Louisiana’s quick secession.

April 23 was World Book Night! Beacon Broadside and the UNC Press Blog both ran excellent posts describing their efforts and experiences giving books out (in one case, via surfboard!). Really great stuff (and really fun blog post reads)!

UNC Press also featured a guest post from Steven I. Levine and Michael H. Hunt on civilian casualties through history and in today’s military conflicts, comparing US reactions to civilian deaths caused by organized military action and by unsanctioned acts of individual soldiers.

Our Manhattan neighbors, NYU Press, ran a controversial article by Ronald Weitzer that originally appeared on CNN. In the wake of the Secret Service scandal in Colombia (not Columbia), Weitzer argues that prostitution should be legal, as it is in many countries around the world.

As one can see from a quick look at our philosophy booklist, we here at CUP love cogent explanations of the complicated issues raised by Continental Philosophy. This week, the OUPblog provided a great explanation of Jacques Derrida‘s feelings about the idea of “Europe” and his hope transcend the simplistic categories of Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism.

Continuing the European theme, Princeton University Press has a guest post by Richard Kuisel comparing the elections in France and America. The post is a continuation of their Election 101 series, which we (again) cannot recommend highly enough.

Finally, we’ll end this week’s Roundup with a fascinating and hopeful post from the MITPressLog: “Can Robotic Dogs Help Socialize Children with Autism?” Apparently, there is evidence that robotic toys can help children with autism communicate more effectively with adults. Peter Kahn suggests that the lack of repetition in the way these toys behave might be behind this effect.

As always, if you particularly like something or think we left something important off our list, let us know in the comments!

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

We are very excited to have joined the Books at JSTOR initiative which will help to make university press books more accessible online. Here is the press release describing Books at JSTOR and the involvement of other university presses:

Books at JSTOR Grows, Adding Prominent Academic Publishers Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and California University Presses To Make Scholarly Books Available on JSTOR

Four prominent academic publishers in the United States announced plans today to bring their scholarly books online at JSTOR, one of the most well-known and widely used scholarly research sites. This is the second wave of presses to join the Books at JSTOR initiative. The initial group included Chicago, Minnesota, North Carolina, Princeton, and Yale University Presses.

“The digital landscape is taking shape for academic books, and we are thrilled to be partnering with a set of publishers that share our commitment to disseminating superior scholarship and an organization that has a great track record of meeting the needs of libraries and researchers,” said Alison Mudditt, Director of University of California Press.

JSTOR was founded in 1995 and began archiving and bringing online the back issues of leading journals in economics and history, including The American Economic Review, Econometrica, The American Historical Review, and The William and Mary Quarterly, among others. The focus is similar with books. Publishers are being invited to join the initiative based on the relevance of their titles to the content on JSTOR and importance of their publications to scholars now and in the future – an approach many librarians have come to rely on from JSTOR.

CUPOLA allows users to search the full text of books or chapters and link to individual pages for future reference. CUPOLA also offers free access to selected chapters, notes, references, and indexes. Flexible and variable purchase options let you decide how CUPOLA will work best for you and allow you to download e-books or chapters to your computer or view them on your e-reader.

CUPOLA is now offering access to more than sixty titles in Social Work and Business and Economics. In the coming months, we will be adding more titles in these fields and from other subject areas as well.

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The Columbia World of Quotations is now available as app for the iPhone, and features 65,000 quotations by more than 5,000 authors covering 3,000 years—from Bella Abzug to Frank Zappa and Galileo to Themistocles.

The application is based on an expanded and updated version of the classic and frequently updated print version. The Columbia World of Quotations is the largest searchable database of quotations available as an iPhone application, providing its users with easy navigation and search capabilities.

Users can search for quotations in the application by author or speaker’s name, by subject, words within quotations, exact phrase, nationality, occupation, birth date, and century. Any or all of these categories can be selected for search criteria. The iPhone application also allows users to create lists of favorites, e-mail quotes, or just browse at random through the world of quotations.

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Carolyn Kellog’s Los Angeles Times‘ blog Jacket Copy features a post about Ted Striphas and his take on Amazon’s Kindle. Striphas is an assistant professor at Indiana University and the author of the forthcoming book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. The book is due out this Srpring, so we don’t have the book’s Web page up yet but for now you can find out more about his work and the book at his very good blog Differences and Repetitions.

In the Los Angeles Times post, Kellog discusses Striphas’s book and his paper, “Kindle: The New Book Mobile or the Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling.” (You can read a very rough draft of the paper here.) One of the issues Striphas considers in the paper is how the debate about the extent to which the Kindle reproduces the experience of reading neglects other issues. Striphas writes:

A fixation on Kindle’s paradoxically imitative qualities deflects attention from the ways in which Amazon aspires to transform the act of reading itself into an economically lucrative, value-generating activity.

As Striphas suggests the Kindle’s two-way connection to Amazon gives the company the unprecedented opportunity to measure the nitty-gritty details of how and what we read.

First, it is wrong in fact and in spirit to conclude that the Press has radically restructured the Project from a subscription only to an open access model. Rather the Press recognized some months ago that with so few subscriptions purchased for its online version of these electronic works, usage would continue to be disappointing, and promotion would continue to be made all the more difficult. So the Press insisted that the project explore a working relationship with the ACLS e-history project as a service to our authors and their works. ACLS has an installed user base nearly 10 times the size of the former Gutenberg-e site which the Press managed in collaboration with the Columbia Libraries.

The Press’s efforts on behalf of Gutenberg-e authors has consistently been to improve the visibility of these publications, to seek reviews in the media, and to connect them as much as possible to a larger body of work which students and scholars have already found useful. So to be clear, the Press did not migrate the project to Open Access abandoning a subscription model. Rather we have moved it to a more mature and widely used subscription platform. A significant disappointment for me is that there was so little support within the library community to promote and support the project as a service to scholarship. Certainly the modest subscription costs for these projects were a barrier to no one. Personally, I remain skeptical of the long term value of open access publishing to support the kind of rich and deep scholarly publishing our industry has developed over many years. Open access shifts the costs, but does not eliminate them. To the extent that it also shifts the expertise, it is a threat to all of us who care about publishing scholarship. (more…)